the quality food people

Oh yeah, do you know how you know you’re suffering from job burnout? When you can’t seem to chill out enough to do productive things.

Tonight, instead of doing something that probably needed to be done, I was looking at pictures of old Giant (Landover) grocery stores on DC Grocery.

Giant Food really is one of the more interesting supermarket chains from a historical standpoint. It started a lot later than most of its industry counterparts and concentrated on a handful of contiguous markets in the Washington, DC area, but still was able to cast a major shadow on the industry, providing such innovations as combo grocery-general merchandise stores (in the ‘50s!) and chain-wide grocery scanners way before even its largest competitors.

Considering who I am and what I do, I don’t consider it a waste of my evening, especially when I found a vintage The Hecht Co. logo in an ad posted on the same site that had the Giant photos.

I’m weird. I don’t miss my local Hecht’s. But I miss the Washington-area Hecht’s, as well as the Woodward & Lothrop and Garfinkel’s. I think for me they helped define the market as a distinctive entity. You don’t get that with national chains. But I digress.